According to a recent survey by eConsultancy, many marketers are not ready to provide a mobile-optimized digital experience to consumers.

This is a worrying statistic, as the world is now mobile. In the US alone, over 48% of all time spent on the internet is done through mobile devices. In many other countries, most notably India and China, mobile access already outstrips desktop internet access . If providing a satisfactory digital experience was not a clear enough incentive to get mobile ready, then how about revenue: 84% of smartphone shoppers use their phone inside a physical store, a phenomenon called Show-rooming.

Additional key findings from the survey suggest the following:

For marketers who reported that the majority of their internet audience or revenue stream was from mobile, just over 3 in 5 said they had a well-defined mobile strategy.

For mainstream marketers, only 1 in 4 saying they had a well-defined strategy.

How do marketers create the cornerstones of a well-defined mobile strategy? In my opinion, it’s all about these four key points:

Marketing Data Strategy Plan:

The foundation of a great mobile strategy is data, otherwise you’re just guessing. At the very least you need to understand the percentage of web traffic that comes from mobile devices, so you can invest appropriately in creating mobile experiences.

In addition, people’s behavior is contextual, and their web browsing behavior is different on mobile devices compared to PCs. Not only that, but research shows that browsing behavior on smartphones is different compared to tablet behavior. Without the ability to track behavior back to devices, you may craft the wrong mobile experience.

2. Keep Content Together:

It is important to understand how the mobile internet fits within each consumer’s overall relationship with your brand. While some of this information can be attained through explicitly asking the consumer for their preferences, the most valuable information will be derived from analyzing implicit consumer behavior in real-time. After all, no one is going to tell you that they’re browsing your website to compare your online prices to a competitor’s store prices, are they? It’s up to you to recognize when this is happening.

3. Rules are Dead, Long Live Rules!

Having collected all your marketing data in one place, you can develop insights into the different segments that visit your website and their mobile behavior. These segments can then be used to drive rules that personalize each digital experience, providing more satisfying interactions for your consumer.

Explicit rules, though, can only take you so far. Consumers now expect web experiences to be tailored to their individual interests. To do this, you’ll need a website that can interpret patterns in consumer behavior, create implied preferences from these patterns, and present content that is matches these implied preferences in real-time. Mobile digital experiences are living, breathing interactions, so your website needs to have the flexibility to meet this requirement.

4. Responsive Design, but not the way you think it should.

With a keen understanding of your consumers’ mobile behavior, you need to ensure that your website is designed so it can be viewed properly on different devices, otherwise known as Responsive Design. While Responsive Design has been around for a while, it’s important that you know that there are different types of Responsive Design.

Most traditional Responsive Design relies on relies on screen size based adaptation. That is, all the code necessary to render a page is sent to the consumer’s mobile device, and a CSS Media query within the code then helps the device decide what content to display.

A better way to provide a mobile optimized web experience is to use Responsive Design with Server-Side Components, otherwise known as RESS. Unlike traditional Responsive Design, RESS uses device/browser based adaptation. This means that, when a mobile device requests a web page, your website detects what device/browser is being used and only sends the appropriate code for that combination. This not only means your website loads faster on mobile devices, which creates a better consumer experience, but also that it’s easier to create and maintain a responsive website –one of the main challenges to operating mobile-optimized websites.

That’s it—4 cornerstones to a great mobile strategy. Would love to hear your comments and thoughts, so feel free to post them below.

Kam, thanks so much for passing along this information, especially the finding from Econsultancy about enterprises not being ready to effectively provide mobile-ready content for their customers. This is indeed an alarming situation given the penetration of content consumption through mobile devices.

I think your recommendations are spot on and are very important considerations for any enterprise doing business in today's always on, mobile markets -- in the U.S. and globally.